Death Club

by Ty Patterson

  In the distance he saw what he didn’t want to see. Roger bending over Miguel who was spread out on the floor.

  The satchel around his neck gaping wide enough for Zeb to see inside.

  It was empty.

  Chapter 29

  ‘Is he alive?’ Zeb asked as he limped over to his team.

  ‘Yes. Unconscious,’ Meghan rose, her face pale as she inspected him. ‘You–’

  ‘The flasks are gone? Rog, did you see who he gave them to?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. The cops, the FBI, they are questioning everyone. Werner is running through the tapes again,’ her face said it all, ‘It’s not looking good.’

  An idea struck Zeb when his eyes caught a camera. ‘The house is clear?’

  ‘Yeah. No Privalov or Voronoff. No one but these guys who call themselves the organizers. They don’t know where those two are.’

  ‘Broker?’ Zeb waved at his friend who was some distance away, talking to Burke and a few other agents.

  Broker trotted over to them, his grim face lightening for a moment. ‘There are easier ways to earn a mil, Zeb.’

  Zeb pointed to the cameras, ‘Those are connected to a wireless router, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Broker’s face tightened when he got Zeb’s drift. He pulled out his screen from his pocket and punched keys furiously. ‘The control house or office will be close by, well within the router’s reach.’

  Zeb went outside, Bear and Chloe following him. Outside were more cops and FBI agents, a couple of them who looked askance but didn’t stop them.

  He went out of the drive, through the gates and onto the street. Two neighboring houses, both gated. No gawkers on the street. It wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. Residents didn’t rush out of houses to see what had happened. They made calls to the cops. That was what the police were for.

  The street curved out of sight from where Zeb stood. No traffic. Would Voronoff or Privalov want eyes on the house? No. Why would they? They had cameras.

  ‘Meghan?’ he tested the implant.

  ‘Yep. Broker’s got some results. First house on your left, is a banker’s. Beth’s calling him up. Second is a lawyer’s. I’m awaiting a call. There are some offices, but here’s the deal. There’s a house bought by some company, at the same time as this one. Two streets away.’

  Zeb took off with a loping run, Bear following, Chloe overtaking both of them. She had climbed the iron gate by the time they reached it, and opened it from the inside for them. Zeb motioned to them to spread out, Chloe to the rear, Bear to one side, while he approached from the front, with his hands raised in the air.

  ‘You don’t have your gun?’ Chloe paused from running behind the house, and headed back to him.

  ‘No,’ he motioned her back. ‘Get in from the rear.’

  ‘I’m in,’ Bear grunted. ‘Doesn’t look like anyone’s here.’

  Bear was right. The house was empty. No signs of anyone living. Its enormous bedrooms were cold, a fine layer of dust over the beds.

  ‘Zeb? Bear?’ Chloe called out from the ground floor.

  They tracked her to a utility room near the kitchen and stopped short when they entered. It was the control room, its screens still active, showing the fight house.

  ‘He’s coming to,’ a medic motioned Burke over who hurried over to Miguel and bent over him. The Mexican’s eyes fluttered a few times and looked blank when he stared back at the FBI agent and the twins behind her.

  ‘Miguel?’ Burke spoke softly, not wishing to alarm him. ‘You are safe. I am FBI Special Agent in Charge, Sarah Burke. Miguel?’

  The Mexican’s eyes came back to her. ‘Where is everyone?’ he asked haltingly.

  ‘We have arrested them. You are safe,’ she leaned closer and didn’t hide her urgency anymore. ‘Where are the flasks, Miguel? What’s in them? Who did you give them to?’

  ‘Maria, Juana. They have them,’ Miguel was on another track. He showed no signs that he heard her.

  She grabbed the Mexican by the shoulders and ignoring the medic’s warning, shook him. ‘MIGUEL,’ sternly, the I’m in charge voice. ‘Listen to me. We’ll get Maria and Juana back. But you have got to tell us where the flasks are.’

  ‘They are gone,’ Miguel replied helplessly. ‘They took them.’

  ‘Who?’ she gritted her teeth, forcing herself to stay calm. ‘Can you recognize them if they are here?’

  ‘Si.’

  She helped him stand and led him to the captured men who were lined up against a wall.

  ‘They not here,’ Miguel shook his head. ‘They were maybe your height. Brown. Dark hair.’

  ‘Wait,’ Meghan clicked her fingers, interrupting them. She brought her screen out and replayed the feed from Roger’s cameras. ‘Are they in here?’

  Zeb was still at the second house, searching through the rest of it, while Chloe worked on the computers. Bear went through drawers and desks and flinging them away as if they were paperweights.

  ‘This’s all encrypted, Zeb,’ Chloe shouted from the utility room. ‘Maybe the twins or Broker, they could do something.’

  ‘Where’s your ride?’ Zeb asked Bear when his friend approached.

  ‘Five minutes away. Why?’

  ‘We’re going to New York. To the Russian Cultural Center.’

  ‘Him,’ Miguel pointed to a blurry face in the crowd. ‘He was one of them. There were two.’ He fell silent as the feed started rolling again. ‘No, not him, no.’ He fell silent when the video started looping again. His eyes were guilty as if he was at fault for not spotting the second man.

  ‘Here,’ Beth thrust her screen in front of his face. ‘Is this the man?’ She had stripped out the rest of the crowd, removed the noise, and had sharpened the image he had identified.

  ‘Si,’ Miguel said more confidently. ‘That’s him. The second one looked same.’

  ‘Same?’ Realization dawned on her and she grabbed Meghan’s shoulder and got her sister to stand next to her. ‘Same like us?’

  ‘No. Not so same. Like...’ he broke off searching for words, ‘like brothers.’

  ‘Okay. Werner can work with that too.’

  More typing, more commands to Werner who responded quickly.

  ‘Like any of these?’ she presented her screen on which were several variations of the man Miguel had identified. Werner had run several programs on the image, an aging program, a facial variation one, minor changes to hair, major changes, to produce pictures of possible siblings.

  Miguel flicked through the first set, past the second set, and at the third set, his finger stopped.

  ‘That one. Exactly like that one.’

  The second image was of a slightly older brother, but with the same recognizable features, except for longer hair and thicker lips.

  ‘Meg?’

  ‘On it. Werner’s identifying.’

  Burke patted Miguel on the shoulder, ‘Did they say anything. Did you talk to them?’

  ‘Si. Si. I asked what was inside the flasks. I was so scared for so many days. I was so happy to give it to them. I asked what was so important.’

  Miguel’s eyes filled with fear. He grabbed Burke’s arm. ‘He said we will know. In about an hour’s time.’ His eyes scudded to the left, to the right, seeking a clock.

  ‘It’s four fifteen pm,’ Burke told him. ‘Did they say anything else?’

  ‘No. They went. Then the fighting started.’

  Burke rose, her face pinched, stopped and turned when Miguel called her. ‘He said something to his brother when going,’ he scrunched his face to recollect the exact words. ‘It sounded like Jihad.’

  Zeb listened without interruption while Meghan unpacked it for the three of them. Bear was speeding towards the Cultural Center’s office in Chelsea.

  ‘He’s positive?’

  ‘Yes,’ she affirmed. ‘We played back the word to him in several accents and several ways. Accent was American. The word was Jihad.’

  Bear, slowed as he neared the Lin
coln Tunnel. ‘I can still turn around.’

  ‘Keep going. Meghan, give our plates to Burke. Ask her to inform the cops. They are not to stop us.’

  The SUV surged forward at that as Bear cut through lanes, sounding his horn continually, his lights flashing.

  ‘An hour? Where?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ she was eerily calm, going into a state Zeb had trained them into. Keep emotions in check. Box up panic and throw it away. If you can’t influence events, fear will not change anything.

  ‘What’s in an hour’s travel.’

  ‘New York. JFK. Many places. Take your pick.’

  ‘They won’t repeat the venue.’ Zeb didn’t question whether they were terrorists. He and his crew had to go on what was available. All signs pointed to terrorists. Islamic terrorists.

  A billboard flashed past, announcing a football game. One high school playing another. Vehicles fell behind as Bear continued his controlled, aggressive driving. Something floated at the edge of Zeb’s mind. He didn’t chase it. It would come to him eventually.

  It was when they were in the tunnel, its lights streaming past, casting reflections on their windscreen, that it came to him. Billboard. Game.

  ‘Meghan?’

  ‘Still here,’ she spoke through his implant.

  ‘Burke’s nearby?

  ‘She’s with me. Wait one. I’ll put it on speaker.’

  ‘Burke?’

  ‘Listening.’

  ‘Miguel said an hour, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. The exchange happened at four. So around five pm.’

  ‘A game started. Ten minutes back. Two high schools. Sold out crowds.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Chloe, from the rear, loud enough for Burke and the twins to hear. ‘I saw that billboard.’

  ‘It’s fifteen minutes away from you. At the MetLife Stadium.’

  Chapter 30

  MetLife Stadium. Home of the New York Giants and the New York Jets. The second largest stadium in the NFL with a seating capacity of eighty-two thousand five hundred. It was also where the New Jersey High School Football Championships were held, a game that had started ten minutes earlier.

  Burke got a swift rundown from one of her agents as she issued orders in a rapid staccato. ‘Choppers. Drones. Get anything and everything airborne. Organize the SWAT teams. Snipers on the roof. Photographs with every security person in the stadium. All, get over there, NOW! Someone, call the stadium.’

  ‘We don’t have an identity. We don’t know who those two are,’ an agent objected.

  ‘We do, now!’ Meghan read out from her screen. ‘Karim Shamoun. That’s the older one. Janitor at the stadium. Been employed a few years now. Model employee. I’ve forwarded everything to you. Don’t ask me how I got those details.’

  ‘The younger one?’ Burke asked Meghan as they hustled to various vehicles and set off to the stadium.

  ‘Werner’s looking.’

  A phone was thrust into Burke’s hand and she blanched as she had a short call. ‘That was the Director of Security. There are over fifty thousand people inside. Moms. Dads. Kids. The players. He says evacuating will take half an hour.’

  ‘They could open those flasks anytime. We can’t do anything,’ her pallor turned grey. ‘All those people–’

  ‘Burke?’ Zeb cut in, his voice strong over the phone that Meghan held in one hand while an agent drove them to the stadium.

  ‘We won’t reach it in time,’ she carried on.

  ‘BURKE?’

  Meghan gripped Burke’s shoulder. Hard. To get her to compose herself. To listen to Zeb.

  ‘You can’t think of what might happen,’ Zeb was emphatic, ‘It’s possible they may release whatever’s in that flask before we stop them. But they were planning to do that in any case. Do what you were trained to do. Stop them.’

  Burke closed her eyes for a second and when she opened them, they were decisive. Her game face was back. ‘We have some good news,’ she replied. She didn’t thank Zeb for the shoring up her self-belief. It wasn’t the time or the place. ‘The game was supposed to start at four thirty. There were delays. It’s kicked off only just now.’

  Now was four-forty pm.

  ‘How long’s the first quarter? Zeb asked.

  ‘It’s a high school game. Twelve minutes. First quarter break is two minutes long. Why?’

  ‘It will happen sometime in the second or third quarter.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘First quarter is too early. People will be late. Second or third quarter is when the stadium will have maximum occupancy. They want a spectacle.’

  They reached the stadium in five minutes, traffic giving way to the stream of law enforcement vehicles. Bwana and Roger, along with a FBI sniper team, got out and ran to the maintenance entrance.

  A guard took them swiftly inside and pointed out the approach to the Solar Ring, which was a network of photovoltaic panels that rimmed the stadium. The sniper team leader paused from briefing his team, when Bwana and Roger reached the top of the rim and looked at them silently.

  ‘You never told us who you were.’

  ‘Nope,’ Bwana replied, hefted his Remington M24 SWS and hurried to one side of the oval while Roger headed to the other. They both moved in controlled haste, since the solar panels were slippery. ‘All you need to know is we are on your side.’

  ‘Are you two any good?’

  Despite the urgency, Bwana stopped and turned. ‘Who’s your best shot?’

  ‘That would be Pedersen,’ the team leader jerked a thumb at a sniper who was following Roger, running over the panels, to the opposite side of the stadium.

  ‘We are both better than him.’

  Middle of the oval, because of the spectacle element. Middle of the oval at either end, would be where the brothers would be. Bwana lay down on one panel, its smooth surface reflecting him and the sky, swiftly assembled his bipod, on which went his rifle. He removed his phone, placed it beside him, and thumbed it to show the feed from Werner. Far below, deep down below, was the stadium, in which ant like figures ran, the players. The sound of the crowd was like the crash of waves on a beach. An ebb and flow, a rising and falling as the play changed.

  Werner and its grid supercomputers had taken control of all the cameras in the stadium and were getting them to scan the spectators. There were more than ten drones in the air, which too were feeding images. Each image was compared to Karim’s and his brother’s. Probables were investigated by another supercomputer. Women weren’t considered. No kids, either. Only men, that too of a certain height and build.

  ‘Rog?’

  ‘I’m ready. Opposite you.’

  Bwana scoped his friend, raised his thumb in acknowledgement, and canted the rifle downwards. The height didn’t bother either of them. They were used to it. They had often taken shots from the beds of choppers far higher than the stadium.

  ‘Burke?’ he paged her.

  ‘Yes. Got him?’ She asked him eagerly.

  ‘Not yet. We’ll take the shot. Roger and I.’

  A minute’s silence while she processed what he meant. They didn’t have proof. They only had two facts. One, that Miguel had given two flasks to Karim and his brother. Two, that Karim worked at the stadium. Insufficient evidence, a prosecutor could claim and land the FBI in a heap of problems.

  On the other hand, Bwana and Roger could act independently. They didn’t belong to any official agency.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  The second quarter started. The noise level in the stadium reached a crescendo at the first kick. Flags waved in the air and parents yelled and screamed and cheered their team.

  Bwana drowned out the noise. He blanked out the game. The scope existed. Its view existed. Meghan’s voice in his ear, when she announced a match, would alone matter.

  A player prepared to take a kick.

  ‘There,’ she was matter of fact, when she spoke. ‘In the L row.’

  �
��I don’t know where that is,’ he replied, equally calm. ‘Describe location.’

  ‘Go to the center. In the direction you are looking. Go down from the top. Or up, from the bottom. Karim is exactly in the center.’

  Bwana scoped, sped past red-faced parents and kids eating popcorn and drinking soda. He overshot Karim, backtracked, and then found him.

  He double-checked with the image on his phone. It was him. The same hair. The same eyes. The same features. Karim was sitting while those around him were standing and swaying. He had a pair of binos in his hand that he raised to his eyes frequently. His face was beaded with sweat, and he appeared nervous as he brushed his hair repeatedly. Or is that a signal?

  ‘Roger? You got your man?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s got binos and he’s brushing his hair.’

  ‘SO IS MINE. TAKE THE SHOT.’

  The ball sailed in the air, its oval shape spinning, aerodynamic lift propelling it to its apogee, before gravity came into play and ordered the ball to return to earth.

  The bullet left Bwana’s rifle at close to two thousand six hundred feet a second. It too did not fly in a straight line. It rose high, to traverse the distance, and then started dropping from its height. It started losing speed, though not as noticeably or as significantly as the ball; it was just drag at work.

  The reduction in speed didn’t matter. Thousands of hours of workmanship and design had gone into the M24 SWS and its 7.62 mm round. The bullet carried more than sufficient destructive power on impact.

  It nullified any further threat from Karim.

  ‘Tangos down. Nothing released in the air. No explosions. Agents are heading to the body. The game’s called off. The stadium is being evacuated.’ Meghan called out. No triumph in her voice. There was time for that too, not just then. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Not far,’ Bear, angry, impatient, frustrated. ‘We’re on Ninth Avenue, but stuck in traffic.’